Strategic Trustworthiness via Unstrategic Third-party Reward – An Experiment

Lilia Zhurakhovska ()
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Lilia Zhurakhovska: University of Erlangen-Nuremberg & Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn

No 2014_06, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: In modern societies more and more people interact with strangers in one-shot situations. In these situations it might be difficult to trust others. Yet, trust is an essential component of most economic interactions. In this paper (in a one-shot situation) an impartial third party can reward another stranger for being trustworthy towards another unrelated person. By design the reward is costly and cannot be strategically motivated. Subjects strategically increase their trustworthiness towards others if they can anticipate to be rewarded for such behavior by an impartial third party. Impartial third parties reward trustworthiness irrespective of whether it can be anticipated.

Keywords: Norms; strong indirect reciprocity; third-party reward; trust game; helping game; anticipation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D03 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-05, Revised 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2014_06

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